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by Aeremaee



Series: DCTV Stories [2]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Reverse Snow, Snowellsweek2016, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 19:26:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7281679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aeremaee/pseuds/Aeremaee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were all dead anyway. It didn’t matter. </p><p>Except that it did. </p><p>Except that he doesn’t think she deserves any of this.</p>
            </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

> Written for Snowellsweek 2016, for the Day 3 prompt Evil All Along.

Guilt was a strange thing. It was guilt that made him keep telling himself that she was dead, had been dead for a long time, really, so that it shouldn’t matter at all whether she was having a bad day, or when she got upset with him for being rude, or when she smiled or when she told him stories of when she was a child. He’d never even bothered to find out what was actually going to happen to her. She was not important. She had no impact on the future. No influence outside of her social circle. Insignificant.

She’d probably just marry Ronnie Perfect Hair Raymond, have a gaggle of beautiful and smart children, make some important but not world changing contributions to science, and that would be that.

Except it bothered him.

It had bothered him right from the start, when he found out she was in the pool of applicants for a job at S.T.A.R. Labs and they were planning to go with someone else. It still bothered him when she was full of vim and vigour and didn’t let him get away with anything when he had finally arranged for her to be hired in a different job, where he could keep a closer eye on her. It bothered him whenever she was nice and kind and soft around him, when she smiled at him in a way he’d never seen her smile at anyone else – at least not until Ronnie Perfect Teeth Raymond had come along. It bothered him in a way being around Cisco didn’t, no matter how fond he was becoming of the boy.

They were all dead anyway. It didn’t matter.

Except that it did.

Except that he doesn’t think she deserves any of this.

He’s surprised by the fierceness and nature of the emotions that surge through him when the particle accelerator – the one he built, the one that could never _not_ blow – is overloading and Ronnie Perfect Abs Raymond is going to his death. He knows the boy is going to his death. He was already dead anyway. But Caitlin doesn’t know that, and she watches him go as if the boy is taking her life with him, and he can’t stand it. He’s viciously, gloriously satisfied at this side effect of his goal, at the removal of this annoyance to his daily life, this nuisance in his lab, of this mere _boy_ who is hardly worthy of the magnificent woman he’s managed to win. _So long and fuck off, Ronnie._ But Caitlin is looking at the empty doorway as if the light of every star in the universe has gone out, and something in him swells and bursts and he can’t not take her hand, pull her backwards towards him, tell her the boy will be alright and they’ll fix it even though it’s a blatant lie and he knows it. He can’t not try and give her comfort even though all of this is his fault – was never supposed to happen in the first place – and now she won’t have that gaggle of kids with Ronnie Perfect Smile Raymond.

Suddenly he feels wholly committed to making sure she has a better future, one that she does deserve, one that is _more_ than anything she would have had before.

*

Guilt is a strange thing.

It is guilt that first screws his throat shut when he wakes up in the hospital after the building collapsed on top of them to see her stuffed awkwardly into the arm chair next to his bed, engagement ring crooked on her finger, breathing fitfully in her sleep.

He wants to tell her. Wants to tell her why he’s doing this. Wants to tell her who he is. Wants to tell her he’ll make it better, that it’ll be worth it, in the end.

He watches her sleep instead.

It screws his throat shut again the first time she sees him in the wheelchair, a look of despair on her face as if this is somehow worse than watching the man she loves disappear into the bowels of the accelerator. As if this is what brings home to her that their lives have changed irreparably. It makes him want to get up and cross the room in long strides so she can see that it’s nothing, that it’s a ploy, a way to recover his link to the Speed Force. He wants to cross the room to where she is and wrap her in his arms and hold her through this, hold her until she won’t mourn Ronnie Perfect Nose Raymond anymore.

Cisco manages to make her laugh instead.

She insists on coming home with him. A lot of things will need to be adjusted now, she says, and I won’t leave you to deal with them alone. It will take time to get used to this, she says, but one day at a time will see us there. He doesn’t think she’s talking about the wheelchair, not really. None of this is your fault, she says. Everything about this is his fault, he knows, but she looks at him like she wants to cry and he thinks she already knows, too. She makes coffee in his kitchen where she thinks he can’t reach anything anymore and he knows he could make this go away but guilt screws his throat shut and steals the strength in his legs as if he really were paralysed.

He watches her hands, watches her fumble her way through the process until she fumbles the canister and then spills the milk and breaks a mug all in the twenty seconds where she tries to recover it. She stares at the kitchen counter like it’s a perfect metaphor for her life right now, and maybe it is. Then she sinks to the floor slowly, as if gravity has finally won their tug of war of 30 years, and starts to cry. The way it wracks her entire body makes him think that this is the first time she’s managed to since the explosion. She curls in on herself and cries, in low, heart-breaking wails, and he can’t take it.

He’s up and around the kitchen table in a second and lets himself drop heavily against the kitchen cupboard to pull her into him, wrap himself all around her and rock her steadily, side to side, whispering comfort and love into her hair before guilt can make him swallow that, too.

They sit like that for a long time before she returns from being a creature of nothing but grief. She shifts in his arms to bury her face in his neck and he feels her breathe him in. He remembers the way she used to smile at him, before Ronnie Perfect Jaw Line Raymond, and wonders if maybe she’ll ever smile at him like that again. If he deserves for her to. The answer to that is probably no. He rocks her because he can, because she still lets him, because he doesn’t want this to ever end. Wants her warm and safe in his arms from now until the end of time.

She puts her hand on his leg, carefully, slowly, and squeezes. He pulls his leg up, slowly, carefully, and traps her fingers at the back of his knee, warm between his thigh and calf. She doesn’t say anything, burrows just a little deeper into him, waits. With the smell of her hair in his nose he tells her. Who he is. What the future he comes from looks like. How the only light in his life in a ruined wasteland was the Flash and all the amazing stories about him. How he came to realise the Flash was anything but a hero and how he had come to be everything the Flash was not. How he had finally learned who the Flash was and when he was from, and how he could stop him once and for all. That he had failed. That now the only way he could ever return to his own time was with the Flash’s help. That he was afraid of never completing his mission now. How tired he was of bearing this alone, even though she didn’t deserve this burden. Tells her everything, or almost everything.

She doesn’t ask him if he meant for the particle accelerator to explode. She either already knows, or she cannot fathom anyone doing something so terrible on purpose. Instead she asks him why he would even want to return to a world like he described.

He tells her it’s home.

They don’t move for a long time after that. He thinks she must be thinking about what home means for her, now. He wonders if she believes him. He wonders if he should have told her that there was an actual Harrison Wells, but he doesn’t want to put that weight on her shoulders, too. He thinks about the boy in the hospital bed he hasn’t told her about yet, either.

Finally she stirs and he lets her go. It might be the hardest thing he’s ever done. She still hasn’t said anything aside from that one question.

“Good night, Eobard,” she says, looking into his eyes for only the briefest of seconds, and then she leaves. He doesn’t think he will ever see her again.

*

Three days later she’s standing next to him, looking into Barry Allen’s hospital room.

“He doesn’t look like the end of the world,” she says.

“Villains don’t usually look like villains,” he says.

“He hasn’t actually done any of the things you’ve told me about,” she says. “Not yet.”

“To me, he has,” he points out. “To me, it already happened long ago.”

“Maybe he can still change. If you would guide him,” she says.

In this moment he hates Barry Allen more than ever before, that he might ruin his Caitlin’s life where before she might have had nothing to do with him. Hates himself for it, just as much.

“Time wants to happen,” he says, quoting his friend Rip to her. “The fact that I didn’t manage to take him out attests to that. I can’t change the past any more than you could change the trajectory of the sun. It was arrogant of me to even try. The irony of needing him to get home is not lost on me.”

“He doesn’t look like the end of the world,” she says again.

“Maybe if you would guide him,” he says, glancing up at her briefly. She hums and her fingers brush his shoulder for just a heartbeat.

“I’ll see you at work,” she says, and strides down the hall without waiting for him to wheel down behind her.

*

It’s awkward, at first. It’s just the three of them and Allen’s comatose body, but they make it work. The first time she smiles at something he says, it turns him stupid with victorious pride. Sometimes she looks at him like they’re both in on a joke that no one else gets.

Cisco catches on, of course, and starts looking at them like he thinks they’re adorable.

It doesn’t take him long to settle into his old behavioural patterns again, slightly rude, a lot arrogant, somewhat surly. She doesn’t let him get away with it any more than she did when they first started working together. She looks at him like he’s a man, now, instead of the man she works for. It makes him bold, makes him look her in the eye for just a little too long, brush her fingers when she hands him something a little too often, makes him smile at her more suggestively than he ever would have dared, even before Ronnie Perfect Hands Raymond. Every time she looks up at him from underneath her lashes it _does_ something to him.

With her beside him he would be invincible, he knows.

It’s not why he wants her.

Somehow Cisco must have decided they need a little room to work with. He starts leaving earlier than he used to, reminding them to order dinner if they’re going to stay, telling them the weather is nice enough for a walk home. He’s about as subtle as a brick through the window. Caitlin doesn’t seem to mind. He doesn’t mind, either, because she does stay late, they do order dinner, he does walk her home.

Well.

He wishes he could _walk_ her home.

The way she sometimes eyes his legs makes him think she wishes it, too.

It makes him want to use the strength in his legs for things other than walking.

They talk about important and unimportant things, but even the unimportant things become invaluable to him. He wants every tiny part of her she’ll give him, wants to collect them all and hold them close to his heart from now until not even the Speed Force can escape entropy any longer.

When Allen wakes up he is more afraid than he ever has been before. The boy is a golden retriever puppy with superpowers and unwaveringly kind and caring. Nothing like he expected. Nothing like the Flash he hates so much.

Caitlin smiles when he’s around him and he is terrified beyond belief that it will be Ronnie Perfect Shoulders Raymond all over again.

Except that now she notices him seething with jealousy and she smirks at him, that closemouthed, infuriating smirk that he wants to bite off her lips. He clutches the armrests of the wheelchair until his knuckles turn white and when she brushes past him her fingers trail over them and he can finally relax.

He’s putting the different parts of his plan in motion, slowly but surely. If she notices his work, she never comments. It makes him itch to include her, because with her help how could he possibly fail? It’s pouring rain outside and they’re the only ones left in the lab and he wants her so bad. He needs her. Needs her for himself, not just to succeed.

The guilt still nags at him, that she deserves more, that she deserves _better_. Than him. Than this. She deserves everything. He doesn’t say anything.

He opens his front door to her, hours later, and she’s soaking wet, as if she walked all the way here from her apartment. Wordlessly, he lets her in, lets the door sway shut behind her, stands up from the chair to show her the respect she deserves. No roles to play here. No mask to wear, no secrets to hide.

She stands in his hallway, looking regal and strong, searching his face for the answer to a question she hasn’t asked him.

“Why would you want to return to a world like the one you described to me?” she finally asks, voice soft but determined.

“Because it’s home,” he replies, like he did all those months before.

“You’re _my_ home,” she says. “Take me with you.”

For a moment he searches her face for the answer to a question he won’t ask her.

She steps into his arms, and he takes her to bed.

 

 

With her by his side he’s invincible.

Together, they come home. 

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](%E2%80%9Daeremaee.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D)


End file.
